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In a separate agreement, the republics pledged to implement coordinated radical economic reforms ensuring free enterprise and to stick with the ruble as a common currency for the time being; national currencies might be allowed later, but only "on the basis of special agreements." Less formally, they decided to move together toward free prices on Jan. 2 and to introduce a value-added tax and take other steps to hold down the budget deficits that are fueling runaway inflation. Details on how to achieve these worthy aims are to be filled in later. But at least the agreement promises to halt the slide toward economic war.
Unspecific though it is, the economic agreement is a model of concreteness next to the 14 articles of the overall pact. In only a few places does that document even approach specificity. It states that the founders are "striving to liquidate all nuclear armaments under strict international control" and pledges the republics to respect one another's territorial integrity and to guarantee their citizens equal rights and freedoms. Bland as these provisions appear to be, they are significant in light of a major threat raised by a breakup of the U.S.S.R.: the menace of interrepublican hostility, or even war, over the status of ethnic minorities.
Otherwise the founding agreement pledges the commonwealth republics to a vague concept of cooperation in many areas of government, from education to foreign policy. But what are these common policies to be? Who is to see that they really are coordinated? How? The document says only that "the parties consider it necessary to conclude agreements on cooperation in the above- mentioned spheres."
The signers counter that they were not preparing a document for the ages, only patching together something to arrest the momentum toward anarchy and ! begin a process of reintegration. Arguments about details would have been fatal to that endeavor. They are probably right, but the document nonetheless is rife with opportunities for bitter disagreement.
On their determination to kill off the Soviet Union as a unitary state, however, the signers were completely clear. Gorbachev was understandably insulted because Yeltsin phoned the White House to tell President Bush about the agreement before Shushkevich dialed Moscow to inform the Soviet President. Whether the snub was deliberate or an oversight, it conveyed the same message: the signers considered the Soviet President irrelevant, if not an obstacle, to their new union.